Benny (Keir Tallman) keeps his hair long, wears his mother’s hat, loves TV soap operas and Fleetwood Mac, and plays with dolls, though they are, technically speaking, action figurines. It makes his Uncle Marvin ask him—“Are you a cowboy or a cowgirl?” “I am just Benny!” comes his strong, staunch retort. Billy Luther’s Frybread Face and Me is about an adolescent’s assertion of himself. But, before that, it is about a journey to discovering who he truly is. Giving him company in this enforced self-searching is a cousin Frybread Face (Charley Hogan) with whom he bonds during the summertime he is forced to spend at his maternal grandmother Lorraine’s ranch in Arizona.
On the face of it, Frybread Face and Me might feel like any other coming-of-age film. But arriving at adulthood here is not individuated so much as placed in the broader context of the family’s history, what Benny chooses to inherit from it, and what he decides to leave behind. Learning about the family makes him take a deep dive into who he is and what he wants to be. Executive produced by Taika Waititi, the film played at SXSW and Toronto International Film Festival and will be dropping on Netflix soon.
Though the film is drawn from Luther’s own memories of his Native American Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo family, it has a larger resonance. A family ranch with no running water and electricity, where you work around the generators to somehow try and watch snatches of your favourite soaps on TV, a grandmother who can’t speak in English—it would ring a bell with children in India too, paralleling their experiences of going on a vacation to their remote village homes.
City native Benny lands in this new world wanting to immediately get back home to San Diego. You are ruining my life; he tells his mother. But there’s lots to draw from the grandma and uncle but most so from the free-spirited Aunt Lucy and, of course, the strong-headed cousin Frybread Face.
They might be the same age, but Frybread is infinitely more rooted in the Native Indian reality than Benny. At one level the film is about a city slicker learning about his native Navajo language, history, culture and traditions from the members of his extended family, finding pride in the gorgeous hair and cheekbones that they are bestowed with and appreciating the pictures of the ancestors, the “beauty queens” and “bull riders” hung in between the dust and stains on the walls. He must learn the fact that Navajo stories are more about symbols than facts, that they don’t give any credence to the notion of time. Most of all it is about having the honour of making the youngest member of the family laugh and being the initiator and harbinger of the crucial Navajo baby’s first laugh ceremony.
At another level the film is also about embracing responsibility, filling in for their uncle at the ranch when he gets injured in an accident, tending and shearing sheep for him, and searching for the missing one. It’s also about the larger, age-old themes of alienation and belonging, the rural-urban divides, and the pros and cons of opting to stay settled at home as opposed to choosing to uproot, displace, and migrate in search of a better life. Benny confesses to sticking out in San Diego but doesn’t quite fit in, in his grandmother’s Arizona ranch either. Eventually, it’s about the choices we make, whether we decide to take the dirt road or the paved way.
Not much happens in the film. It’s not story or plot-driven and there’s little drama or action propelling it. What stands out is the spread of the native characters, their thoughtful representation, the complex grid of their interpersonal relationships, the way they shape each other and get formed in the process themselves, and, most of all, about the complicated family dynamics. How all families are essentially a “group of contradictions”.
In India, we often talk about making films that attempt to find the universal in the local. In the particularity of the Native American experience in Frybread Face and Me lies the ubiquity of a larger human truth that keeps on echoing in the mind long after the film is over.
Cinema Without Borders
In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world
Film: Frybread Face and Me
